How to Use Box API with Drupal

How to Use Box API with Drupal

Box is a cloud-based service designed to store, access, and share files across devices with the ability to collaborate. Box separates the administration and display of files and folders, allowing developers to customize the experience even on mobile devices. This provides a responsive user experience with minimal effort while allowing your content administrators to continue working within the familiar Box application.

The display to the end user can be customized through an open development platform, known as Box Platform. The Box Platform also provides easy-to-use SDKs for their APIs in a variety of code languages.

Imagine that a client needs to create a portal to provide company branded and personalized pages. These pages not only display pertinent information about owners of the company, but also display a person’s documents that can be accessed from a single page on successful login. This methodology provides an efficient manner of organizing and allowing access to specific documents. All of this can be facilitated with Box Platform.

Once the API integration is built, it can be inserted into a variety of different applications. For example, if you use a Drupal content management system (CMS), you can use the built-in user accounts to retrieve lists of files and folders based on the person’s permissions within Box.

There is no need to maintain a separate set of permissions within the CMS. This logged in user can click through lists of files until they find the one they’re looking for and preview the full file within their browser via a Box View embed. Further actions to share, download, print, and edit can be added to the file preview, depending on that person’s individual access permissions.

The sky’s the limit once you have the basics set up. You can add single sign-on and even integrate other services, such as a document signing service or secondary storage locations. It’s easy to extend the API to accomplish your project’s individual goals. The Box Platform makes it easy to use the Box tools, permissions, organizational rules, and file metadata in your own application.

The level of detail in the API allows you to accomplish nearly everything the native Box application is able to do within your own environment. They even provide UI elements to help prototype your application workflow faster. If you’re thinking of integrating an application with a file storage solution, you can’t go wrong with Box.